n May 2009, a momentary glitch on AirFrance Flight 447 sealed the fate of all 288souls aboard. As the Airbus left the coast ofHad Bonin and his (equally inexperienced)copilot done nothing at all, they likely could’velanded the plane safely. Instead, as related in anarticle by William Langewiesche (2014), Boninpanicked. He pulled back on the stick, pitchingthe plane steeply upward and sending it into aspin-stall. Again, he could’ve solved the problemby doing nothing; the plane would’ve returned to alevel path. Yet he kept trying to solve the problemthe only way he could think of—by pulling backon the stick. By the time his senior captain awokefrom a nap and rushed to the cockpit, it was toolate. Moments later, they plunged into the darkocean.

This tragic case of inexperience in the cockpit
illustrates an important insight from research
about what it takes to solve complex problems:
expert schemas.

Learning from Chess

Much of what we know about how experts solve
problems comes from studying chess grandmasters, who can quickly memorize the location
of pieces on a chess board—unless those pieces are
placed randomly on the board. As this latter detail
indicates, the masters don’t have photographic
memories, but rather an acquired ability to see
patterns resulting from moves (De Groot, 1966).
Similar abilities have been found among experts
who solve complex problems in other arenas.
Experts see problems more clearly and can select
among multiple possible strategies to solve them.

According to seminal work on the topic (Newell

& Simon, 1972), what experts have that novices
lack are schema that allow them to ( 1) categorize a
problem; ( 2) construct a mental representation of
it; ( 3) search for appropriate problem-solving strategies; ( 4) retrieve and apply those strategies; ( 5)
evaluate the problem-solving strategies; ( 6) repeat
steps 1 to 4 if they don’t arrive at a solution; and
( 7) store that solution for later use. At the heart of
these schema are two kinds of knowledge—
declarative (knowing what) and procedural knowledge
(knowing how)—that experts integrate. When they
face a complex problem, the experts rely on their
declarative knowledge to understand it and their
procedural knowledge to solve it (Nokes, Schunn,

& Chi, 2010).

A small-scale comparison of novices (
first-year college students) and experts (doctoral students) further illustrates how experts use schema
when tackling complex problems—in this case,
researching and writing a 400-word essay on
whether it’s best to follow printed expiration dates

Bryan Goodwin

RESEARCHMATTERSIHelping Students Develop SchemasLet’s show students the processes experts use to tackle problems.